The city of North Plains may be small, but its government is in a state of turmoil even much bigger cities rarely experience.
In late July, the City Council voted to part ways with the city manager. The next day, the mayor resigned. Multiple city councilors have resigned this year, and two more members of the council are facing recall efforts. The city attorney called the staffing shortage a crisis unparalleled in her decades of experience working in local government.
The staffing shortage isn’t the only pressing issue facing North Plains, which sits about 18 miles outside of Portland with a population of just 3,440 people. The city, known to many for its annual Elephant Garlic Festival, has also failed to keep up with state-mandated audits, completing its audit for 2022 just last month. That report found that the city’s financial accounting practices have been inconsistent.
The upheaval rocking North Plains has been building over the last several years—with debates about the city’s future mirroring larger debates about land use, data centers, and housing in communities across Oregon.
The chaos began in earnest in 2023, when the North Plains City Council unveiled a plan to expand the city’s urban growth boundary by 855 acres.
Opponents of the expansion proposal balked, collecting enough signatures to send the proposal to the ballot. In the resulting referendum held the following May, over 70 percent of voters rejected the expanded boundaries.
But that result was not the end of the story. The legality of the referendum has been contested due to a 2024 state law exempting urban growth boundary expansions from referendums, and, meanwhile, the debate about growth in North Plains has continued to play out in increasingly contentious fashion.
“There is history there,” Councilor Kipperlyn Sinclair, who serves on the city council in neighboring Hillsboro, said. “They have their own historical downtown corridor, they are a small population, and it’s unfair to have such a large turnout two years ago be minimized.”
The stakes of a potential urban growth boundary expansion have also shifted since voters weighed in two springs ago. An expanded urban growth boundary could include additional land zoned for residential and commercial uses, as well as for industrial use—which could pave the way for companies to build data centers in the area.
It’s a possibility North Plains residents are particularly attuned to given what has happened in Hillsboro, where a proliferation of data center construction led the city to pass a temporary moratorium on new data center construction or expansion last month.
North Plains is still developing a concept plan for a potential growth boundary expansion. If the final plan leaves room for data centers, however, it could reshape the economics of the city and its surroundings.
“The companies that place the data centers are going to win,” Linda Glass-Merten, the chair of the community organization Strong Towns North Plains, said. “The landowners, who currently own farm property stand to win, because they’re being offered thousands and thousands more dollars per acre [for] developable industrial land than they would ever get trying to sell their land as farmland.”
That’s in addition to land speculators, who Glass-Merten said have snapped up land along Highway 26 with the expectation that the growth boundary might be expanded to the west. Nellie McAdams, executive director of the Oregon Agricultural Trust, said it’s an old story.
“There was one former county commissioner who said the best way to make money farming is to buy land by the acre and to sell it by the square foot,” McAdams said.
The potential presence of data centers in North Plains’ future has become a flashpoint in debates between the city’s pro-growth and “smart growth” factions—both of which say they welcome new development, necessary to bring things like a grocery store and additional restaurants to the city, but with different points of emphasis.
“If you ask the average North Plains person what they’re looking for, they would probably say, ‘I’m not opposed to growth, I just want to grow reasonably. I don’t want to take on the tax burden of all that infrastructure. I didn’t come here so I would be surrounded by data centers,’” McAdams said.
Data centers are enormously unpopular in Oregon, and their unpopularity cuts across partisan lines: two thirds of voters support a temporary ban on data center construction, and three quarters of voters oppose extending tax breaks to attract data center construction.
Last month, Gov. Tina Kotek canceled a deal that would have seen the state sell 32 acres of land to Verrus for the construction of a new data center in southeast Salem. The governor, who is running for re-election, subsequently announced that she supports locally-set moratoriums on new data center development.
“Data center corporations are taking Oregon out to an expensive dinner and leaving our environment, communities, and people to foot the bill,” Kotek said in a statement.
Kotek’s recent statements on data center construction represent a potential change of direction for the state government, which has handed tax breaks to data centers roughly $400 million per year.
Part of the issue is that the benefits of data centers to the communities that house them are murky: a recent study from Brookings found that data centers tend to create only a modest number of jobs, while taking up a significant amount of space and requiring a large amount of infrastructure.
“The compelling reasons we’ve been told [to support data center construction] are that they bring jobs,” Glass-Merten said. “That turns out not to be true. The other compelling reason is that they’re necessary. I think that probably is true, but they’re not necessary here.”
Undergirding the conflict about the potential urban growth boundary expansion is not merely a debate over data centers, but about a vision for the future of North Plains—about whether the small town will remain rural or gradually come to look more like Hillsboro.
Glass-Merten said she doesn’t want to see North Plains lose what has given it its distinct charm.
“Right now, people will come because it’s rural, because it’s close to Portland, [but] you can breathe clean air, you can hear the quiet, you can see stars at night, you can recreate, you can do all the things you can’t do in Portland,” Glass-Merten said.
Glass-Merten’s other concern with industrial development is that North Plains is currently home to some of the state’s—and the country’s—best farmland. The town is surrounded by predominantly Class I and Class II soils, capable of productively growing a dizzying array of crops.
“That land could grow anything, any of the 220-plus crops that are grown in Oregon—and a lot of it is irrigated, so irrigation isn’t as much of an issue,” McAdams said. “It is incredibly critical to our ability to feed ourselves in the future, because the more land that you lose, you lose the infrastructure and the critical mass to keep that industry alive.”
Sinclair said the county as a whole needs to plan for its agricultural future alongside its commercial and residential future.
“Land is Washington County’s greatest asset, and North Plains is its own community,” Sinclair said.
